Keep It Clean!: Big Ideas That Changed the World #7 (a Nonfiction Graphic Novel)

This entertaining graphic novel from award winner Don Brown will get kids talking, since it's all about the history of dealing with poop, pee, and dirty hands.

Part of the Big Ideas That Changed the World graphic novel series, this full-color book is appropriate for the classroom and includes a timeline, endnotes, and a bibliography.

In 1895, an engineer named George Waring was appointed New York City's first commissioner of street cleaning. His task? To make a city with millions of people livable.

Narrated by Waring, Keep It Clean! explores the concept of public health, which means ensuring clean water and adequate sewage disposal for everyone, and covers topics such as personal hygiene, sewer systems, and chemical water treatment.

Acclaimed author-illustrator Don Brown takes readers on a journey through history and around the world, from Greek, Roman, and Aztec aqueducts and the dawn of bathing (including social public bathing in Japan and religious bathing ceremonies in Machu Picchu) to the invention of soap in the Middle East, the first use of flush toilets approximately 4,000 years ago, and the first toilets used in outer space--a Big Idea when you consider that early astronauts on Apollo 11 had none!

Full of facts and colorful historical figures, Brown chronicles both historical mishaps--like rivers full of human waste and King Henry VI's notorious basement of poop--and monumental scientific breakthroughs including Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch's discovery of the link between microbes (germs) and disease.

Brown also highlights how social classes became divided not only by wealth and culture but also by smell, and calls attention to modern-day health crises.

Today, nearly two billion people around the world live without clean water and about 3.6 billion people--nearly half of the world's population--live without proper sanitation. Breaking down concepts in an accessible, kid-friendly way, this nonfiction graphic novel shows why "keeping it clean" is vitally important whether it's a city, town, home, or person.

Big Ideas That Changed the World is a graphic novel series that celebrates the hard-won succession of ideas that ultimately changed the world. Humor, drama, and art unite to tell the story of events, discoveries, and ingenuity over time that led humans to come up with a big idea and then make it come true.

More from the Big Ideas That Changed the World series:
Rocket to the Moon! (#1)
Machines That Think! (#2)
A Shot in the Arm! (#3)
We the People! (#4)
All Charged Up! (#5)
It's About Time! (#6)

Author: Don Brown
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 10/21/2025
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.87w x 0.68d
ISBN: 9781419779961
Audience: Ages 9-12


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2025

About the Author
Don Brown is the award-winning author and illustrator of many nonfiction graphic novels and picture books, including It's About Time!, All Charged Up!, We the People!, A Shot in the Arm!, Machines that Think!, and Rocket to the Moon! His books have been called "masterful" and "a must for youth graphic collections." Brown has received an Eisner Award nomination, two Sibert Honors, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award honor, a YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award, and multiple starred reviews, among other accolades. He lives in the Hudson Valley in New York with his family.